Color Commentary

The shape-shifting masterminds of “Key & Peele.”

There is a notable manic richness in Key and Peele’s impressions of every style of “hard” black masculinity.

Illustration by Stamatis Laskos

Sketch comedy creates converts, not fans: stumble upon the right bit, and you’re an instant devotee. With “Key & Peele,” on Comedy Central, the only skit I’d seen from the show was the viral hit “Obama Anger Translator.” In it, Jordan Peele (the stocky guy) plays the ultra-calm President, while Keegan-Michael Key (the lanky bald one) plays Luther, the guy Obama’s hired to say what he can’t. “I am not a Muslim!” Luther howls through a megaphone, sputtering and cussing. The skit was smart, it was cathartic, but it also felt kind of like a one-joke gag.

Then one day, killing time on YouTube, I fell down a “Key & Peele” rabbit hole, and realized that, like Gob from “Arrested Development,” I had made a terrible mistake. The sketch that hooked me, about an obese nerd named Wendell, was from Season 2. Initially, it seemed like another one-joke concept, as the mountain-size Wendell, played by Peele with an unsightly goatee, ordered three large pizzas by phone. “Good question, I’ll gauge the room,” he says agreeably, responding to the pizza guy’s queries about cheesy crust. But, when the camera zooms out, we see that Wendell is actually alone, talking to his action figures.

A fat joke, right? But, midway through the order, the pizza guy—played by Key—gets interested in Claire, one of the dolls with whom Wendell is pretending to party. Wendell tries to bat his questions away, first by saying of Claire that “she’s kind of a big girl,” then by claiming that he’s slept with her already. (“I hit that, sexually,” he declares, with Reddit-esque hauteur.) But the pizza guy doesn’t care how Claire looks, or what she’s done. He begs Wendell to tell Claire that he’s her soul mate. Wendell is shaken. “Wow,” he says, after a long pause. “You really do care about Claire.”

That’s not where the skit ends, of course—it ends in an outrageous Hail Mary pass that I won’t spoil, because there’s nothing more numbingly Soviet than summarizing comedy, as the sentences above may demonstrate. Yet it was clear that I’d not merely underestimated “Key & Peele” but committed the dumbest possible error, slotting it into a ridiculous niche: the comedy show with two light-skinned black guys. No one calls Jimmy Fallon’s program “the white-boy show.” No one describes the “Late Show with David Letterman” as “the seems-like-he’s-about-to-snap-Caucasian-codger show.” Yet I’d not only wedged “Key & Peele” ’s comedy in with other Afrocentric sketch shows, from “In Living Color” to “The Chappelle Show”; I’d reduced the pair’s biracialism to a kind of gimmick.

Key and Peele’s biracialism is central to their comedy, but in a far different way than I’d imagined: it is expansive, not constricting, a Golden Ticket to themes rarely explored on television. Like many of the best, most transgressive comics, they treat human behavior as a form of drag, shape-shifting with aggressive fluidity. It’s a school of funny that in the wrong hands can be a mean trick, as with Amos and Andy doing blackface, or Milton Berle’s ugly-woman shtick. To modern joke critics, the key distinction between a good joke and a bad one is supposed to be between “punching up” and “punching down”—taking a cheap shot at someone who is already weaker than you. But, often enough, that distinction depends on the referee: Dave Chappelle’s motive for abandoning his own Comedy Central show, after all, was in large part his discomfort with what, exactly, his white fans were laughing at.

And yet there’s enormous freedom for a comedian who decides that no imitation is out of bounds, as the Australian Chris Lilley showed in his underappreciated HBO series, “Angry Boys,” which ran for one season. Lilley, a white comic, transformed himself into, among others, miserable adolescent twins (one of them deaf), a Japanese stage mother, and a wannabe hip-hop star named S.mouse, played in blackface. Other examples of this kind of unfiltered comedy include Whoopi Goldberg’s breakthrough act, the 1983 multi-character one-woman show “The Spook Show”; Tracey Ullman as a horny male cabdriver and a gay flight attendant, on “Tracey Takes On . . .”; and the unforgettable sequence on “30 Rock” in which Alec Baldwin acted out a multiracial therapy session by imitating Tracy’s entire family, merrily flecking the dialogue with pop-culture references from “Good Times” to “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and violating, through the sheer bravado of his performance, all the rules of politeness, of who gets to play whom.

For many male comics, the primal twist is putting on a dress. On the Canadian show “The Kids in the Hall,” the performers were particularly goosed whenever they got to play one of the show’s long line of prim, defeated Toronto office girls or chain-smoking Montreal street whores. Key and Peele do play women—Peele has one fabulously manipulative female character, Meegan—but the bulk of their drag is male. They play Indian guys, Latino guys, white guys, biracial guys, mobbed-up Italians, Mexican thugs, gay fiancés, and plenty of characters whose race is beside the point. (In the première of the new season, which began last week, one of the funniest skits is an elaborate parody of “Les Misérables.”)

But Key and Peele’s true passion is intra-black-male drag, with scenes that explore the many ways that African-American men perform themselves: they do buppies, nerds, suits, and black Republicans. (“We’re not a monolith,” identically dressed black Republicans declare, one after another.) There is a notable manic richness in their take on thugs in prison, hip-hop performers, sports heroes, and every style of “hard” black masculinity—the characters who are freer, like the anger translator Luther, to violate every taboo. These are the roles, as they explain in an interstitial stage bit, that the comics themselves, as light-skinned, non-“street” black men, could never get cast in. When the two men tried out for the sketch show “MADtv,” they assumed they were each auditioning for the same “black guy” slot. (Eventually, both of them got roles.) The 2008 election expanded their options. “It’s hard to tell if there was a place for us on television before Obama,” Peele says, on a commentary track on the DVD of Season 1.

Once they began producing their own show, in 2011, they transformed that frustration into what they describe as “thesis scenes,” exploring the nature of “code-switching.” In the show’s first-ever sketch, two men are standing on a corner, talking on cell phones. Listening in on each another, they enter an unacknowledged arms race, their talk changing with every line, getting harder, more hip-hop, more slangy, as if they were competing to be the blacker black man. When the light changes, the man played by Peele quickly strides away, and, once he’s out of earshot, his voice shifts into an alarmed effeminacy. “Oh, my God,” he announces to his friend. “I seriously almost got mugged.”

This dynamic has been played out in a million variations over three seasons on “Key & Peele,” building patterns and interweaving themes. Plenty of skits center on competition: two men contend to have the better hat, to order the more soulful soul food—“Donkey teeth! Straight out a donkey’s mouth!”—or to turn a rap song into either a deep political manifesto or a rant about “tig old bitties.” There’s a hilariously demented showdown between Bobby McFerrin and Michael Winslow over who is the finer mouth-noise artiste. In one terrific early sketch, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X get caught up competing for praise from an older black audience, throwing in iconic quotes from famous speeches, vying to earn loud “Mmm-hmm”s, and finally devolving into a dance-off. Like that bit, many of “Key & Peele” ’s skits are structured in a classical sketch-comedy manner, in which an absurd situation is cranked up and up and up, until it explodes.

The cerebral vibe of “Key & Peele” ’s “comedy math” (as they call it on a commentary track) is at times akin to that of the IFC series “Portlandia,” but their acting style is far more visceral, and they embrace more explicit provocation. In one early skit, Key and Peele are slaves on a block, who start out boasting that they’re going to start a rebellion but end up competing to be bought. Their idea of a parody of “The Wire” involves a gangster losing control of his bowels. Some of their sketches play on specific types of African-American male anxiety, like the “Substitute Teacher” skit, which features a rattled, pugnacious former inner-city teacher who insists on pronouncing his white suburban students’ names ghetto style, changing Aaron into “A. A. Ron.” “Insubordinate!” he snaps at the students who try to correct his pronunciation. “And churlish.”

That this sketch is fuelled more by empathy than by mockery is due largely to how thoroughly the two men—each of whom is charming in his standup—are willing to erase themselves. Dave Chappelle is a transcendent performer, but the potency of his imitations is that they make him even more visible: his mischievous charisma burns through any mask he throws on. The same was true of the early Eddie Murphy, when he seized the spotlight on “Saturday Night Live.” In contrast, a recent viral “Key & Peele” hit is all about disguises. It’s an ESPN montage of college football stars with crazy names—“D’Jasper Probincrux III,” “Beezer Twelve Washingbeard,” “[The Player Formerly Known As Mousecop]”—the sort of joke you might hear from a racist comic, too. Except that it doesn’t read that way at all, because every player gets a unique voice, a distinct personality, his own dreads or goatee or bandanna or earring or lisp or drawl. Hard to say if this is punching up, down, or sideways, but it’s the show’s greatest strength: making specific the men the culture treats as indistinguishable. ♦